It can go both ways of course. The first edition of Norman’s classic ‘design of everyday things’ was 1988, and it’s interesting to read that book today and see how a lot of the hard problems he was discussing were completely solved by the advent of touchscreen interfaces (specifically, the ability to reconfigure the interface according to what tasks are relevant at that moment). Done right, touchscreens are a huge boon for usability (I mean, look at what the iphone did). Done poorly they’re a disaster, but that’s been true forever with UI design regardless of the tools at hand.
(I haven’t read the revised edition (2013) of Norman’s book, I guess he must address touchscreens)
What are the examples of touchscreens done right besides the iPhone which is also on a UX downhill since, probably iPhone 4 or 5 era?
Cars? Motherfucking abysmal.
ATMs? How many times we tried to press a button realizing you're missing it completely because there's a 3-inch think screen?
Laptops? Only those who like fingerprints.
Cameras? I think if you are seriously using it, you prefer tactile.
Signature pads? This should not even exist.
Vending machines? I think they're more confusing with buttons jumping on screen and changing their labels than without.
Handheld video games? Still rely on buttons.
I wish designers would not try to stick them in everything. They're only good for small handheld devices to cram lots of functions in, and they're always a UX compromise. They can only improve the number of functions you can squeeze in a device.
What these have in common is that they are touchscreens. I can't think of a case of something else which just happens to have a touchscreen where I wouldn't prefer some other interface.
I prefer devices with qwerty to be honest, and if you already have a qwerty input plus sensor "joystick" w/ pressable button under it - I am talking about Blackberry - you quickly realize that you don't need sensor input except of for apps w/o proper support of joystick and webpages w/ GDPR.
> Signature pads? This should not even exist.
Drawing pads?
> I wish designers would not try to stick them in everything.
I wish designers and MARKETINGers stop to place them in anything, except of mentioned higher.
> Vending machines? I think they're more confusing with buttons jumping on screen and changing their labels than without
I have a vending machine from Porsche auto salon and buttons doesn't jump. Sensor is needed for adding kind of luxury mood if you already have a display which is needed for jumping Porsche logo.
>a lot of the hard problems he was discussing were completely solved by the advent of touchscreen interfaces (specifically, the ability to reconfigure the interface according to what tasks are relevant at that moment). Done right, touchscreens are a huge boon for usability (I mean, look at what the iphone did).
Eh, reconfigurability and dynamic interfaces are great for developers because it allows you to change things later and fix mistakes. Context sensitive UIs assume my brain can switch spatial contexts as well and for some interfaces, context switches are expensive on my brain. I want to rely more on muscle memory so I can focus on higher cognitive tasks, I don't want my UI to be one of those higher cognitive tasks.
Touch interfaces have their place but too many fall prey to the allure of sexy and try to slap it on every problem. On phones it ultimatelt makes sense, even there jumping between apps and updates on apps I find myself spending time figuring out interfaces far more than I should need to. This hurts usability more than helps it. I understand the goal is typi ally continuous improvement but I wonder for how many the goal is simply continous new shiny
It goes further than warnings though - at least circa 2012 using an unofficial charger (or official charger where this fragile extra wire is broken) would underclock the cpu dramatically. It happened silently, such that I didn’t realize what was happening and why my laptop was so
slow until stumbling upon a random forum post about it. I was pretty sour on Dell after that experience.
Really? I have a 2013 Latitude and I haven't experienced that yet (or never noticed). I still have the no-name adapter here, so I'll have to check (I only just got a proper 130W).
If that is the case, part of me wants to play Devil's advocate and say that Dell have erred on the side of caution: these no-name adapters really are quite terrifying with thermals, which makes me wonder what wattage they're actually rated for. I was frequently in WTF mode because the adapter block was too hot to keep my hand on. I didn't really have a choice either, as my battery was at like 38% capacity. This official 130W is barely warm under load.
Aside: one thing that really eek'd me out about that no-name adapter is that it has a green LED inside it. The only thing is, you can only (just barely) see it through the slits on the sides because the plastic isn't clipped together properly. The manufacturing quality is atrocious.
Try applying load to the CPU and see what cpuinfo_cur_freq reports. If I boot my ThinkPad W530 (workstation laptop with a large power envelope) with no / dead battery, it will say full speed is available, but it will remain at the minimum speed until the battery is partially charged and I reboot.
This happens even on new Dell machines, even if the PSU is detected but a lower wattage than the shipped PSU. I have wondered if it affects Linux more than windows though
A quick way to check would be to `cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_max_freq` while you're on battery, then do it again after you've plugged in the PSU. I checked mine[0] and it apparently doesn't affect this model (the adapter I tested with does not communicate with the laptop at all).
Along these lines, I admit with shame that lately I’ve been switching to airplane mode before looking up or modifying a contact, because it’s not obvious to me which combination of symbol-labelled buttons will do this without initiating a phone call. I feel old.
And don't get me started on trying to click on a missed call to either find out more about the number, access the voice mail or simply get rid of the "new notification" dot. I more often than not start calling the number although that's the last thing I want to do.
Al-foil is ubiquitous in ultra-high vacuum labs because part of the process of reaching this vacuum level involves baking the whole chamber at 120-150dC for 24+ hours. The chambers are typically made of stainless steel which has a pretty mediocre thermal conductivity. Hence the Al-foil, to ensure even heating during the bake. Since you have to bake every time the chamber is opened, it’s easier to just leave the foil on.
The three people are known to you in advance (it’s your group). It was common to game this a little by saving the biggest person as the third one that had to break the bridge.
Oh, really so much faster with pypy3? That would have been very nice to know when putting this together, but in any case is good to know for the future. Thanks for the tip.
Author here. I really wasn’t very good at SPL-T before I changed gears to brute forcing it, so the whole strategy aspect is unexplored here. If you think you have a method that could be phrased in an algorithmic kind of way, please share! This topic is ripe for a more intelligent part 2, from me or someone else.
This would be a good opportunity for something like Alpha Go. Learn a heuristic function and then do tree search using the heuristic. You could start by hand-designing a heuristic and do best-first search to see how much better you do versus exhaustive exploration.
This summary doesn't give numbers, but the journal article being discussed does. About 3e3 to 1e4 S/m for different preparations, compared with zero for untreated silk. Performed as a two-probe DC measurement, so once you factor in contact resistance it might be even better. The details are scarce, so you'd probably want to see it repeated more carefully before concluding anything.
You can see in the video that he does have desoldering braid, but has chosen not to use it. Sounds like our experience differs, but personally I find desoldering braid is seldom helpful for removing parts - it tends to leave behind just enough solder to keep it stuck down, but not enough that you have good thermal conductivity to reflow it with an iron. Without using a heat gun or skillet (which he mentions) I don't know of a better way. You have a lot of experience, so if you disagree I would very much like to learn something!
This is because it just got published in Nature something, the earlier open arXiv version from April is here: https://arxiv.org/abs/1604.02265
Figure 3 is absolutely spectacular, and deserves to be admired by the whole world.
A comment on the inevitable promises of revolutionized data storage: Yes the areal density is fantastically high (>500Tbit / square inch as opposed to 1Tbit/in^2 in bleeding edge HDDs / NAND flash, if I crunched the numbers correctly). But it requires ultrahigh vacuum, preparation of a clean copper crystal, dosing with copper chloride and then writing/reading with a scanning tunneling microscope, maintaining liquid nitrogen temperature.
Also a modern SSD will write about 500MB in a second, while this method would write 500MB in 240 years.
I don't mean to slag it off; we should all appreciate it for being an absolutely wonderful and awe inspiring technical feat. Just don't get carried away dreaming of the applications in your laptop/server/phone.
Pretty cool, but keep in mind that it's at a massive scalability disadvantage compared to flash because of the requirement for a read/write head. Current 3D flash may only be 1.7Tbpsi, but that's with a layer 4 microns thick. Make it a millimeter thick and you're in the same areal density range.
(I haven’t read the revised edition (2013) of Norman’s book, I guess he must address touchscreens)